Ex-students may have hiked jobless rate above 4% in July

TAIPEI -- Taiwan's unemployment rate stood at 3.92 percent in June, the lowest for the month of June since 2001, though the jobless rate in July might rise to above 4 percent, according to a local forecasting website.

The Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said Taiwan's unemployment rate rose slightly to 3.92 percent in June due to the influx of new college graduates looking jobs for the first time.

Graduates looking for jobs will boost the local jobless rate from May to August, especially for July and August, said Lo Yi-ling, deputy director of the DGBAS census department.

A local forecasting website said earlier in August that the unemployment rate in July would be 4.01 percent and the jobless rate for 2014 would reach 3.97 percent, prior to the announcement of July jobless rate in Aug. 22 by the DGBAS.

The ratio of job openings to job seekers held at 2.23 in June, but it fell slightly from 2.33 in May, though it had reached more than 2.0 for five consecutive months since February 2014, according to the job matching website ejob.gov.tw.

The Labor Ministry's Workforce Development Agency said that every job seeker having more than two job options since February represents an improvement in the economy, indicating that employers have more job openings than last year.

The number of employed people in Taiwan in June totaled 11.06 million, up 10,000, or 0.09 percent from one month earlier, while the country's labor participation rate stood at 58.45 percent, up 0.06 percentage points from May, according to the DGBAS.